Month: December 2011

Former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel died recently. Here is a brief documentary video from three years ago on how the young people of the Czech Republic know very little or nothing about the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.

Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of older generations to inform the younger generations about the important moments of history? Especially the horrors of how badly some people with power and authority and their followers have treated others. The younger generations need to know about those things, and about what circumstances led to such horrors and atrocities, so those events aren’t repeated. Yet, horrible events are being repeated in our time, and current circumstances now point toward a repeat of past history.

Here is a video of everyday people showing how informed and educated they are.

And here is a video of people who are asked what they love about America. Most of them say it’s because they are free. There is “freedom” in America.

Do any of those people own a small business? How “free” are they in their business or careers, when they have to follow thousands of meaningless and costly regulations that, if they unwittingly make one little mistake, they not only have to pay fines but might very well go to jail. Have they tried buying raw milk in one state and bringing it home to their state?

How many of these people have been stopped by a cop for no good reason, harassed and worse? There’s a lot of that these days. Do they think they are “free” when they have to go through cancerous radiation scanners at the airport or have their private parts molested and raped? Do they understand that all that is for no good reason except to satisfy the sick desires of pervs and to make money for the government-corporate revolving door kleptocrats?

Do any of these people even know that when governments such as ours expand themselves onto foreign lands and without regard for the actual people who live there, as our government has been doing for decades especially since World War II, that all that has been doing is provoke those foreigners and make us less safe? Don’t they understand that the people to least trust and who are least to be believed with anything are government bureaucrats and politicians?

Do any of these people know that Congress just gave the president legal permission to have the military apprehend and detain indefinitely anyone the president says is a “terrorist,” without evidence brought forward, and without charges of any actual wrong-doing, without a trial? Do they actually understand why the Founders forbade government people from causing presumably innocent civilians from being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”? Why “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”?

Even up to the point of the American Revolution, there were plenty of examples in world history, including some of the Founders’ own experiences, that the Revolutionaries wanted to protect their progeny from in their own newly founded country, which is why they made that attempt with the Bill of Rights. However, the anti-Federalists were right in that one of the biggest evils was centralization of power. Since then, regardless of the Bill of Rights, Lincoln ignored the people’s natural rights to life, liberty and self-determination, and certainly Wilson and FDR did so too. And then there were Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and so on. But now, thanks to our society’s cultural and moral decay, ignorance, centralism, and the people willingly giving up one right after another for the sake of ever-expanding government and police powers, in the name of this or that scheme as a response to situations that were caused by government’s corruption, incompetence and criminality in the first place, the society is now becoming another totalitarian dictatorship, and a third world banana republic. Is there any way that can be stopped?

Sorry for the over-Savage this week, but I want to continue from my blog post yesterday regarding Michael Savage’s lying and smearing of Ron Paul from the night before, because last night Savage continued his tirade. But I don’t really have too much time today, so I am just going to have to leave some links for further details after I write this.

Last night Savage was going on about Ron Paul, this time about how Paul is siding with Hamas regarding the Gaza-Israel conflicts. Savage played a clip of Paul referring to Gaza as a “concentration camp,” which Savage found to be ludicrous. That is because Savage probably never has been to Gaza. Dr. Paul was probably referring to Gaza since the 2008-2009 “Cast Lead” war between the Israeli military and Hamas. Hamas has been the ruling agency of Gaza since 2007.

The Israeli military’s response to Hamas’s firing of rockets into Israel was an example of extreme overkill. The December 2008-January 2009 “Cast Lead” war killed many more Palestinians than Israelis. (Here is a graphic showing the disproportionately small number of Israelis killed in conflicts since 1987 compared to Palestinians killed.) The Israeli military severely damaged the Gazans’ water and sewage treatment centers (just as the U.S. military had done to Iraq in 1991), and the subsequent blockade prevents materials from being brought in to Gaza to make repairs (just as the sanctions and no-fly zones had done to Iraq throughout the 1990s). And just as in Iraq throughout the 1990s, the Gaza population have had to use untreated water.

And also, because of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, well over a million Palestinians are not allowed to travel outside of Gaza, not even for needed medical treatment. More recently, Hamas also has imposed travel restrictions on their own people. And many people are completely unaware of the Jewish settlers’ treatments of Palestinians, including stealing lands and homes with the consent of the Israeli government.

Here is video of Pat Buchanan in 2009, describing Gaza as a “concentration camp.” Unfortunately, because of propaganda that is spoon-fed to the masses from the Israeli and U.S. governments, many people have the mistaken belief that “Palestinian” = “terrorist.” There are over a million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, and only a minute fraction of them are members of Hamas. Savage referred to the million+ civilians in Gaza as “Hamas.” I challenge Michael Savage to actually visit Gaza and meet the Palestinians there, and see how things are there for himself. By the way, Israel did in fact create Hamas, as a way to deal with the PLO, which has been just as counter-productive to them as has the U.S. government’s creation of al Qaeda to deal with the Russians in Afghanistan, more examples of central planning run amok.

Last night, Michael Savage was on his anti-Ron Paul rant again, the anti version of his “Love Ron Paul/Hate Ron Paul” multiple personality disorder. One day Savage is full of praise for Dr. Paul, and the next day, like yesterday, he hates Paul’s guts. Savage referred to Paul as a “Dr. Mengele” and a “Jew hater” last night, referring to the recently exhumed issue of the dreaded “racist newsletters.” I addressed that here.

I just wonder if Savage was saying some of these outrageous things just to make me and others waste our time writing about this, like he wants extra attention from blogs, and so on. One outrageous thing he did was call Ron Paul a “leftist”! A “pied-piper” for the Left! I couldn’t believe it. Savage knows what Ron Paul’s views are, so he is either being retarded, or just trying to get attention, or both. Ron Paul is the most pro-private property, pro-economic freedom and pro-free markets advocate perhaps ever in the United States Congress! If anyone is a “leftist,” it is Michael Savage in his advocating of socialist central planning in immigration, socialist central planning in “national security,” and approving of one governmental intrusion after another into people’s personal lives. I have addressed the issue of how these so-called “conservatives” are really on the Lefthere and here.

Also, regarding another issue favored by the Left, Savage concluded that, because Ron Paul wanted to end the drug war that therefore Paul is endorsing drug use. Savage referred to Paul as neglecting the harmful chemicals in marijuana and as a medical doctor Paul should be concerned. I’m sure that Dr. Paul knows of the possible harms of marijuana, as he does the dangers of alcohol and tobacco but he doesn’t want them to be made illegal. You see, unlike Savage and other so-called “conservatives” who believe the Nanny State should decide for us what chemicals to ingest and what chemicals not to ingest (at the point of a gun), Ron Paul, on the other hand, believes in personal responsibility and freedom.

Savage also played a clip of Eric Dondero, a disgruntled former aide to Ron Paul dissing the Texas Congressman. Dondero has no credibility whatsoever, and shouldn’t be believed in his rant referring to Paul as “anti-Israel.” And in a recent article also responding to Dondero, Daniel McCarthy asks, “Would Ron Paul have stopped the Holocaust?” and clarifies that there would not have been a Holocaust in the first place had it not been for the socialist humanitarian warmongering of Wilson’s extending World War I that led to the rise of Hitler. I’m sure that, were Herr Savage alive in 1917 he probably would’ve supported the Great Socialist Do-Gooder “Making the World Safe for Democracy” Wilson.

Savage’s deliberately misleading information regarding Paul’s past comments (not having anything to do with newsletters), and Savage’s spewing of propaganda as spoon-fed to Savage by his beloved State chickenhawkers, made Savage worthy of the moniker, “Goebbels.” And that’s no exaggeration, if you heard last night’s show. Included in the tirade was a remark about Paul’s reference to suicide terrorist bombings, that Savage interpreted as Paul saying they were justified.

No, Ron Paul never said that suicide bombings are justified. He merely recognizes what motivates the terrorists to want to commit such acts of violence. When people experience drone bombing murders of their loved ones, their children, in schools and churches, wedding parties, and foreign governments occupying their lands and rampaging their homes and businesses and shops, and their innocent friends and family members being apprehended without cause and detained indefinitely and tortured, and all on a daily basis, and for years, such experiences tend to radicalize them and motivate them to retaliate.

But whenever Ron Paul brings up the hypothetical of “what if,” such as what if the U.S. were invaded by a foreign government and various cities and towns were militarily occupied and American homes and businesses were broken into, searched and ransacked and destroyed, the chickenhawkers don’t want to hear it. They can’t believe that someone is actually wondering, “Well how would YOU like it if foreigners were doing these same things to you and your family members?” That is because these safe-distance warriors (who never served in the military and never will) believe in “American Exceptionalism.” How dare you say that our government can’t invade foreign countries that were of no threat to us and occupy their lands and murder their civilians, and actually try to equate that with foreigners doing the same thing here in America!

You see, Savage, Hannity, Beck, Levin, et al. do not believe in the Christian way of “Live and Let Live,” or Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you, and Don’t do to others what one would not want others to do unto you. These warmongers are extremely narcissistic and believe that it’s okay for them and their government to trample on the lives, rights and property of others, but it’s not okay for others to do that to us. Generations of selfish Americans especially since the New Deal/World War II believe these things now. And there’s really nothing Ron Paul can do or say to get people to question or challenge what they have been brainwashed with and indoctrinated to believe about their selfish, self-centered “American Exceptionalism.”

In fact, yesterday Bob Livingston had a brief post about “cognitive dissonance,” in which, no matter how many facts you present to someone, facts which contradict long-held (and long-indoctrinated) beliefs, he will still stick with those beliefs no matter what. And Livingston links to a more lengthy previous post he wrote about that.

For example, I have written repeatedly about the U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq in 1991, and intentional bombing and destruction of civilian water and sewage treatment facilities, and the sanctions that followed that deliberately withheld the means of repairing those infrastructure throughout the 1990s. And that such war crimes led to widespread disease and impoverishment and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq by the mid-1990s, with continuing sanctions and deaths leading into the 200os. Leslie Stahl’s interview of the shrill Madeleine Albright, in which Albright stated that the deaths of those hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children were “worth it,” went viral throughout the Middle East, and what the U.S. government did to Iraqis led to widespread anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East. This was explicitly one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists. But no matter how many times I (or anyone else) write that, on this blog, or on articles I have on other websites, it seems that it “goes in one ear and out the other,” as the saying goes. (Jacob Hornberger has similar points to make today in his response to WSJ’s Dorothy Rabinowitz.)

People just don’t want to hear it, and frankly, I’m sick of it as well. And I’m sick of the counter-productive, anti-American warmongering, the sick propaganda and lies coming from our government and repeated by their stenographers who love the State, right or wrong, like Michael Savage.

Glenn Greenwald has this post today on a Washington Post article on Obama’s drone murders that we Americans and our Free Press (sic) are not supposed to talk about. Greenwald discusses the secrecy of the drone murder program, and how Democrats by and large are keeping the silence in their loyalty to their standard bearer, Barack Obomber. Previously, the Left were quite vocal and outspoken when the murderer-in-chief was a Republican.

Greenwald points out how Americans are kept in the dark about what their own government has been doing overseas, the drone-bombings that constantly result in the deaths of countless innocent civilians, especially children.

Americans love to think that they are so very informed as a result of the robust, free press they enjoy, while those primitive, benighted Muslims are tragically manipulated and propagandized by their governments. Yet here we have an extraordinarily consequential “vast drone/killing operation,” and while those in the Muslim world are well aware of what it is and what it does and debate all of that openly and vigorously, Americans are largely kept in the dark about it. That’s because: (a) the U.S. Government shields it all in secrecy (hiding it from nobody except their own citizens); (b) the U.S. media generally avoid highlighting the innocent victims of American violence; and — most of all — (c) this is all now enshrined as bipartisan consensus, with the GOP consistently approving of any covert government aggression that kills foreigners, and Democrats remaining mute because it is their leader doing it. That’s why this Post article provides such a vivid snapshot of what Washington is and how it works.

Greenwald goes on to say that it is considered unpatriotic to discuss the victims of our government’s reckless aggression and destruction overseas. Yet, patriotism is really supposed to mean love of one’s country. In modern usage, however, “patriotism” means loyalty to one’s government, regardless of the government’s criminality.

Our government officials from Presidents Bush and Obama to Congressmen and Senators such as John McCain and Carl Levin are NOT showing patriotism when their murderous policies result in the blowback of retaliation by the families of those foreigners our government’s military violence and drones are murdering and maiming. Such retaliations and blowback have been making Americans less safe and more vulnerable. These socialist central planners are showing not patriotism but stupidity in their policies.

And now, these officials extend such unpatriotic and in fact treasonous government policies by now allowing the president to have the military arrest and detain Americans based on the whims of soldiers, generals, military bureaucrats, local police, and even based on anonymous tips by neighbors.

Each subsequent generation of Americans and each subsequent generation of the “Free Press” are being progressively dumbed down and numbed down, by the government-controlled schools, TV and texting-addictions, to the point of suppressing the actual reality of what our society has become: just another third-world, totalitarian dictatorship, with a centralized government of criminal bureaucrats, imbeciles and tyrants who love power and who love snuffing out the lives of foreigners and trampling on the rights and lives of their own fellow Americans.

Our discussing these issues openly is in fact the most patriotic thing we could do. The unpatriotic and un-American thing to do would be to suppress the truth, cover-up the government’s criminality and show your loyalty to murderers.

Expect Corruption: Maybe in their minds, it’s not even corruption. The high ranking politicians simply do extra-legal “favors” for one another, and perhaps they even believe their own BS speech, that they are doing them for “the greater good.” Or perhaps not. Perhaps they are just greedy, lying crooks from the very start.Expect Loss of Freedom: Particularly the loss of gun rights. Americans should keep a close watch, and consider gun rights to be the “freedom barometer.” There will be direct attacks on the right to keep and bear arms. Reinterpretation of the Second Amendment. Indirect attempts such as taxing ammunition and firearms out of the reach of the average citizen. A greater number of legal requirements to own firearms. Some people believe that armed citizens don’t stand a chance against a national military force, especially one as powerful as the United States Army. This is the bullsh** lie all governments around the world want you to believe, but the reality is very different.Expect Censorship: We’ve experienced a growing amount of censorship in many forms. Calls from the Presidential Office directly intimidate reporters and news directors. There are threats of legal action and tax persecution to anyone that dares question the government… Phone tapping and email reading are widespread as well.

Fernando also suggests that we should expect an inefficient legal system, failing public institutions such as hospitals and schools that are run by the government or rely on government for tax subsidies. But all of that is what we already have. The main reasons why we have those failing and crumbling institutions and inefficiency are because of the monopolies that government has, especially in education and in judicial decision-making, and because of the centralization of everything.

Local police departments now are very corrupt, inefficient to say the least, and in many cases barbaric in their treatments of not only alleged criminals but plainly innocent civilians just going about their business and posing no threat to anyone. The legal code is overflowing now with hundreds, thousands of laws and regulations that if a cop wants to persecute some guy he doesn’t like, the cop can just arrest him for the most arbitrary and insignificant of laws and regulations. Everywhere in America now, every day, the cops are intimidating, harassing, threatening, beating, kicking, tasing, clubbing, shooting, injuring and murdering innocent civilians. And they get away with it, because the police are above the law, and that has to stop.

What has allowed all this to happen — and it’s only going to get worse, that’s inevitable and we are already in a police state now — is giving the government a monopoly in making up positive laws that have nothing to do with protecting our natural rights, and giving the government a monopoly in community policing and security as well as ultimate judicial decision-making. As far as “justice” is concerned, we need to de-monopolize that away from the government, and decentralize the system as much as possible. And de-monopolization and decentralization must go on in other areas of life as well, such as education, health care, and so on.

At the heart of the scheme under which we currently suffer is allowing some people to be above the law, allowing some people to have the power to initiate aggression against others, allowing some people to have “authority” over others in society in general. This includes not only police, but all government bureaucrats and “public” office-holders. In a truly free, civilized society, no one would be above the law, and the laws against initiated aggression, theft and fraud, and trespass would apply to everyone. There wouldn’t be one set of standards for “civilians” and a different set of standards for those in positions of government-monopolized “authority.” The latter situation is a recipe for totalitarianism, and that is exactly what the supposedly “free” America has grown to be, especially since the turn of the 20th Century. As readers of this blog already know, we now live in a Nazi-Soviet police state.

In a de-monopolized, decentralized society, people are freer and more prosperous when smaller states are able to compete (to attract more inhabitants, etc.), but in the system under which we currently suffer, when living in a territory under a larger, centralized state (e.g. the U.S. government here in America), not only is this larger state NOT attracting more inhabitants, but people are leaving the country, and the more oppressive it is becoming, the more people who are leaving, and the more the government is trying to keep the people in. (Yes, as in all totalitarian dictatorships, when the dupes get their precious anti-immigration wall, they will see it used by our government to keep the people in.)

And in comparing America’s cities, you can clearly see which cities attract more people with lower taxes and regulations and which cities push people away with their oppressive government criminality. One great example is New York City. As I noted here, Rush Limbaugh isn’t the only one who has taken his business away from New York, and his patronizing of New York’s local businesses as well. People are leaving New York City, the city that never thinks, in droves.

Most importantly, as pertains to the article mentioned at the top of this post, if we decentralize and de-monopolize away from government control and toward more freedom and a society of voluntary relationships in which the individual has rights to life and liberty, and in which private property is protected, more people will be “secure in their persons, papers, houses and effects,” and we will avoid the economic collapse that seems inevitable now thanks to government monopoly and centralization.

I have posted the video below before, but here is Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe in a 2005 lecture explaining why a decentralized system of smaller states (sans a centralized power, e.g. the U.S. government, the Soviet Kremlin, etc.) is preferable to a system of centralization and large states that we have now. Hoppe addresses monetary central banking as well as other issues.

This is a bit lengthy lecture by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, at about an hour not including the follow-up Q & A, but it is worth your time.

Now that Ron Paul has been leading in the polls in Iowa and his numbers rising in New Hampshire, it is time for the neocons and others, in their frantic desperation to demonize anyone who opposes the Washington Establishment, to bring back the “racist newsletter” story again. This is despite the fact that they — or at least most of them — know that Dr. Paul did not write those newsletters. What hypocrites, given that especially those radio “conservatives” constantly criticize Obama and Holder for using the “race card” when unable to defend their policies.

Some writers, such as Conor Friedersdorf, have noted that Paul didn’t explain himself on that very well in 2007 during the 2007-08 campaign. My guess is that Ron Paul was just embarrassed that such writings got published under his name without his approval or knowledge (implying that he was “out of the loop,” to quote a former Vice-President).

Paul has said repeatedly that he didn’t write those newsletters. For those who are familiar with Paul’s writings and speeches, it is just unbelievable that he would write those things. Conor Friedersdorf wrote recently,

Do I think that Paul wrote the offending newsletters? I do not. Their style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career in public life — and he is so forthright and uncensored in his pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically correct opinion — that I’d wager substantially against his authorship if Las Vegas took such bets….

Since I first learned about the controversial newsletters in 2008, I’ve listened closely to see if I could hear any racist dog whistles in Paul’s speeches. I never have. As far as I can tell, that ugly part of American politics is entirely absent from his presidential campaigns, comparing favorably even to … statements made by the (other GOP) candidates, the ugliest sentiments are remarks Rick Santorum and Rick Perry have made about gay people, and that Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann have made about Muslims.

And in this long and thorough, and somewhat well-written 2007 New York Times article on Ron Paul, the writer notes that “(Paul) later explained that he had not written the passages himself — quite believably, since the style diverges widely from his own.”

Jamie Kirchick wonders why libertarians “don’t care” about the newsletters. I don’t think it’s right to say they don’t care. Their view is that the offending sentences, of which there are far fewer than critics are intimating, sound absolutely nothing like Ron Paul (can anyone seriously dispute that?), and they are convinced, with good reason, that the kindly man they see in the debates, in interviews and in person is who he really is.

They also believe that our political class is full of people — we may justly call them sociopaths — whose words may always be exquisitely correct, never once straying from proper p.c. decorum, but who think absolutely nothing of (say) bombing foreign populations on the most ludicrous and transparent grounds. Our society banishes those who make insensitive remarks, but considers our knee-jerk bombardiers to be people with a legitimate point of view, and certainly as having done nothing that might end a person’s career.

To call this a skewed moral calculus is about the least one might say about it…

Our country’s political class is full of people who believed it morally acceptable, after 1991, to deprive the Iraqi population of baby food, blood-analysis equipment for children’s hospitals, heaters, syringes, ambulance equipment, insecticide, children’s clothes, school notebooks, bicycles, etc. (I’ll leave aside the so-called conservatives who for some reason think it must be “liberal” to find something wrong with this.)

Now the people responsible for so inhumane and indefensible a policy will utter every p.c. platitude in the world. Every word will be exquisitely proper. Our society thus considers them to be citizens in good standing…

Prof. Woods then links to Justin Raimondo on the newsletters, and a Raimondo follow-up. And there is this video of Paul explaining the drug laws — that he wants to repeal — that very disproportionately affect black Americans much more than those of other races and ethnicity, regardless of actual commissions of crimes and the very small proportion of black Americans compared to the general population.

You see, a lot of people are frightened by those who go against the Establishment and who question and challenge the rulers’ policies. The pro-Establishment statists can’t stand to see someone who believes in individual liberty, property rights, civil liberties and non-interventionist foreign policy being taken seriously and possibly elected by the people. And God forbid someone would openly tell the truth that there is cause and effect associated with a foreign policy that involves trespassing on foreign lands with military bases, invasions and occupations, and someone who dares to recognize that those foreigners don’t like their fellow people getting murdered by U.S. bombs, bullets and sanctions and understandably would want to retaliate.

One such angry, authoritarian “Never Question the Regime’s Aggressions” is WSJ editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz, who referred to Ron Paul as a “propagandist for our enemies,” and implied that his criticisms of U.S. government foreign policy could be treasonous. From her immature rant, it seems that Dorothy Rabinowitz might have sided with the British during the American Revolution. In my opinion, the real traitors are those in the U.S. government who have made Americans more vulnerable to retaliation from decades and decades of U.S. government aggressions and intrusions on foreign lands, occupations and murders of foreigners. And now the U.S. government wants to codify into law a policy of turning the military against their own fellow Americans — you can’t get too much more treasonous than that.

Here is an interview Ron Paul did with the Charleston City Paper‘s Jack Hunter when the Republican Jewish Coalition banned him from their debate.

And finally, I want to repost this C-Span interview of Ron Paul, which I thought was one of his best, in which he was actually given time to respond to questions and fully state his positions on the issues, mainly dealing with economic and monetary policy. The host is Susan Swain and the panel includes the WSJ‘s Helen Sudeep Reddy and Robin Harding of the Financial Times.

According to this article and this article, Obama’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is getting camps ready for not only the post-economic collapse, but for political dissidents and critics of government criminality. This will be made possible by Congress’s just having codified into law Obama’s dictatorship by giving him the power to treasonously turn the military against the American people. Thanks to the imbeciles and criminals of Congress, Obama can have anyone apprehended and detained indefinitely, merely by labeling someone a “terrorist,” at his discretion, without any evidence presented against the accused, without any charges or trial.

Now, those two linked articles go to Infowars.com. Some people have smeared Infowars as a “conspiracy theory” website, but Alex Jones and his crew are very responsible and conscientious researchers and reporters, and they present and link to information that documents and gives evidence to their assertions of government “conspiracies.” So, they are not ‘theorists,” they are conspiracy factualists. And you can see various things by Gov. Jesse Ventura as well. While Ventura actually calls his show “Conspiracy Theory,” he goes out on location and investigates such theories and allegations of possible government wrongdoing, and, especially from this unbelievable video posted just recently (especially starting at about 25 minutes into it), you can decide for yourself whether Ventura is just a “theorist” or a factualist.

In that linked video, Ventura exposes a large “residential” center, with locked front doors and surrounded by high fences with barbed wire facing inward. While it looks exactly like a prison, there were children playing on swings in one area within the grounds. Thanks to the emotionally frantic, post-9/11 dupes for the Bush/Obama’s police state, we seem to be on the road to Soviet-Nazi tyranny — unless someone actually takes action such as arresting Obama and those aforementioned senators and congressmen and charging these government officials with treason.

Yes, I know there are many people who are in denial, and so trusting of their beloved government, especially their federal government, regardless of how much the government abuses them. “They would never do anything of a criminal nature to us.” But just look at Katrina, and the BP-government police state with that oil spill last year. Look at what our military people have done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As I pointed out in this article, look at what our military people have been doing to their own fellow comrades. Being in denial will not help you when you are a target of military aggression, let alone a target of your local police.

Jacob Hornberger noted here and here how dangerous a government’s military could be.

And, regarding this new law codifying Obama’s dictatorship and his merely labeling someone a “terrorist” without evidence shown, only someone extremely naive could think that Obama or any political ruler or prospective one such as Romney wouldn’t have his goons nab someone who challenges their power grabs and who openly presents views that could convince others to withdraw support of the Regime.

Unfortunately, the naive and gullible dupes for police statism cry,”But we have to allow officials to sweep up those ‘terrorists’ based on the judgment of military personnel or police (and without evidence) because we can’t wait for the process of a trial with a jury to prove someone’s guilt and then imprison him, we have to risk rounding up innocents!”

One thing that Gov. Ventura noted in the video was that, with all this stuff, we’re headed for either tyranny or liberty.

Interestingly, there were two deaths this week of two world leaders who contrasted one another in that liberty-tyranny fork in the road: Kim Jong-Il, the crazy dictator from North Korea; and Vaclav Havel, the sensible political dissident who opposed communist Soviet rule and worked for freedom in his country of the Czech Republic (formerly a merged Czech and Slovak Czechoslovakia).

According to Wikipedia, Havel, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, “was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, that proposed the establishment of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. He also received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award and several other distinctions.” (Need I say, beyond what I’ve exhaustively already written, what Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama has done?)

While still in Czechoslovakia under Soviet dictatorial rule, Havel founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted, whose main goal was to educate the population about the persecution of dissidents, people who disagree with government policy and either withdraw their consent and/or openly and actively work to make changes. Yes, the U.S. has the American Civil Liberties Union, and other similar organizations, but it seems that, especially with the latest acts of Congress and Obama and their implicit threats to jail American dissidents, “civil liberties” organizations in the U.S. seem as powerless as they seemed to be in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

One of Havel’s first acts as President of Czechoslovakia, before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, was to give amnesty to and release the country’s political prisoners. Can we possibly expect any U.S. president to do the same here? Particularly with the War on Drugs, which imprisons a much higher proportion of inner-city minorities than others amongst the general population. But what exactly will Obama, the military and FEMA (and Obama’sACORN and Obama’s obedient unionmilitants) do to political dissidents in the U.S., especially if there is to be economic collapse, civil unrest, looting and so forth?

And, in contrast to Vaclav Havel and all his work toward greater freedom and individual liberty, what did Kim Jong-Il do? According to Human Rights Watch,

“Kim Jong-Il exercised total control for 17 years over one of the world’s most closed and repressive governments. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of North Koreans through widespread preventable starvation, horrendous prisons and forced labor camps, and public executions. Kim family rule, starting with his father, Kim Il-Sung in 1948, is projected to continue with Kim Jong-Il’s son, Kim Jong-Un…

“Kim Jong-Il’s legacy includes the fate of the tens of thousands who have died in the kwanliso camps for alleged enemies of the state, where today an estimated 200,000 North Koreans continue to work and die in conditions of near starvation and brutal abuse. In this system, the sins of one member of the family condemn an entire generation to imprisonment. A steady stream of former prisoners who escaped North Korea have testified to Human Rights Watch and other organizations how even children born inside such camps grow up to inherit their parents’ prisoner status.

“Leaving the country without official permission is considered an act of treason, punishable by torture and imprisonment, yet tens of thousands have fled in the last two decades, and thousands more continue to risk their lives every year to escape.”

The way that Jesse Ventura described those “residential” facilities with barbed wire run by FEMA and Homeland Security, it would seem like Dick Cheney, Obama and Janet Napolitano are learning about government-civilian relations more from Kim Jong-Il than from Vaclav Havel.

One wonders about what kind of country America has become when we have the choice between Statist A or Statist B, the Affirmative Action President Obama who collects Spider Man and Conan the Barbarian comics, or Romney who put his dog on the roof of the car for a long trip. (Who would do that?)

And in the current Obama Administration, we have the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs chief Cass Sunstein, who wants to “cognitively infiltrate” Internet websites and social networking sites, and we have an Obama Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan who said that freedom of speech “depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs” (i.e. government-approved speech).

And a “science czar,” John Holdren, who believes that a born human infant “will ultimately develop into a human being,” but believes that trees should have rights to sue in court. And Obama’s former health care czar and current director of the National Institute of Health bioethics (sic) department, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, believes the government should have the power and control to allocate and ration health care, not the doctors and patients.

Why does it seem that so many people in government are just plain nuts?

As the Economic Collapse Blog noted in this article, the legacy of Kim Jong-Il and his North Korean regime is one of “weirdness,” just plain crazy yet frightening stuff. The writer concludes, “Please do not let that happen to America.” I think it already is happening, and we have good reason to believe that. Just where are the Vaclav Havels of our time? (I think we know the answer to that question!)

The real crimes in America are not being committed by or planned by private civilians who believe in personal and economic freedom, private property and the philosophy of Live and Let Live, and who want to speak out against intrusions and threats posed by those with armed, compulsory government legal authority and power.

No, the real crimes are those of our government officials who are extremely clueless about liberty and who are totally drunk with power grabs. Seizing and detaining innocent civilians? Suppressing speech and political dissent? “Emergency” camps? Government degenerates and outlaws have become the most dangerous amongst our increasingly vulnerable population under centralized rule.

In my recent post I referred to the neoconservatives who have been destroying the Middle East and Asia as being on the Left and not on the Right. That is because they believe in government central planning, U.S. federal government expansionism not just of centralized government itself but stretching into and onto foreign territories (like communists), and they love to be at the controls of the socialist monopoly in territorial protection that not only doesn’t protect Americans but has been making us less safe and more vulnerable.

To me, leftism (if you don’t mind my calling it that) is collectivism and under that category are socialism, communism and fascism. On the other side, on the right is individualism that includes private property, voluntary association and voluntary exchange and voluntary contracts. If you want to describe capitalism as free market, voluntary exchange under the rule of law that forbids theft, fraud, trespass and physical aggression (except in self-defense), that’s fine with me, and individualism goes with that. Individualism goes with private property because, in that way of life, you own your own life, person, labor and honestly acquired property. However, under collectivism, the individual is collectively owned and sacrificed by the group, the community, the mob, etc. The scheme on the Left is that the individual is a slave of the collective. There is no private property under collectivism. That is what we have now.

If you want to go by the traditional left-right scheme in the social-cultural area, in which adherence to traditional moral values is on the right, then that makes sense to me given that collectivism on the left is immoral because of its immoral sacrifice of the individual and human life. That is another reason why the Bush-Cheney neocons are on the Left, not just in their love for central planning and government expansionism and socialist government monopoly in security, but because the collectivism of their immoral wars that they started, against Iraq and Afghanistan, were sacrificial of human life and liberty, overseas and at home. People need to recognize the shameful truth about the neocons’ continued seizures of private American workers’ and producers’ wealth to serve the corporate military-industrial-complex who contribute generously to political campaigns, the necons’ sacrifice of thousands of young Americans to serve the Bush reelection campaign and their murders of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, especially in Iraq. You can’t get much more collectivist than all that.

As I have written many times now, giving government bureaucrats a central planning monopoly in territorial security attracts the worst amongst us, those who are attracted to power. The power of State monopoly — with guns and bombs and the sacrificed soldiers employed to use them — is an awesome power, especially if the entire population is compelled by law to use such a service, with no alternatives allowed. All that such a territorial monopoly in security has accomplished has been those government central planning bureaucrats’ provoking foreigners, from Wilson and FDR to Johnson, Bush and Obama. If you take away the government monopoly and legalize competition in security, then those in that line of work will then have the incentive to actually provide the service that is promised. If they cause trouble, they will go bankrupt, get sued, or (one hopes in the case of Bush, Cheney and Obama) go to jail. Monopolists are not accountable. I know Ron Paul doesn’t agree with me on this (or with Murray Rothbard (more here), or Hans-Hermann Hoppe [.pdf] (more here [.pdf]), or Gustave de Molinari, or the Tannehills), but at least he is someone who doesn’t subscribe to this un-American idea that the U.S. government must be the world’s policeman or must trespass on foreign lands with its military bases or invade and occupy any country whose leaders do not obey the commands of the central planning U.S. government bureaucrats.

Now, at times it can be very depressing, hearing these talk radio know-it-alls going on about how “crazy” Ron Paul supposedly is, and it’s mainly about Iran right now. You see, Ron Paul is the lone voice of common sense and the only prominent politician who has been distinguishing between the State-pronounced propaganda (repeated by the LSM) and the actual factual truths. But the easily manipulated masses prefer to have something or someone to fear and loathe, some bogeyman of one sort or another, and the ones who want to have power over them play on that need, to the people’s own detriment. But Ron Paul happens to not be one of those who wants to have power and control over others. He wants everyone to have their freedom. The other pols do not want you to have freedom – the more freedom you have, the less power and control they have.

And Ron Paul is right, by the way, regarding how the government’s central planning bureaucrats and propagandists are doing the same thing now with Iran that they were doing with Iraq in 2002-03 (and with Iraq in 1990-91 as well). I had this page with many articles on these wars and the propaganda associated with them, and there have been plenty of articles in the past year debunking war-on-Iran propaganda (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for some examples). We are seeing the same thing with Syria, too. (This 2007 video shows Gen. Wesley Clark telling of a 2001 memo by the DoD in which the neocons already had the intention to invade “7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” The psychopathic neocons with their delusions of grandeur want to “reshape the Middle East” in their desired, grandiose vision, these social engineering central planning government-violence nutjobs. But Ron Paul is the crazy one!)

But when people only get their news from CBS, NBC, ABC, MSDNC, Fox News, and the Roto-Writers of the New York Times, they will not get the truth, only State propaganda. As I have noted, the degree of naivete and gullibility of even the most intelligent individual is quite astounding. I have heard Michael Graham on the radio say that “Iraq was worth it,” although that was several months ago, so maybe he’s changed his mind now, but I doubt it. Like most of these radio warvangelicals, Graham has been very pro-war and anti-Muslim. Going to Iraq was the right thing to do, despite the fact that George W. Bush destroyed the country, hundreds of thousands of murdered innocent civilians (in addition to the hundreds of thousands of murdered innocent civilians Bush’s father and Bill Clinton were responsible for throughout the 1990s), and Iraq now under rule of Islamic Sharia Law. And now it’s on to Iran, for no good reason. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” But, even though the masses know when their government officials are lying to them and all their past histories show that they are a bunch of liars and shouldn’t be believed, people still go into denial, and let the bureaucrats in control walk all over them.

Regardless of what the “American Exceptionalism” moral relativists say — that it’s okay for the U.S. government to invade and trespass on foreign lands and murder their people but it’s not okay for foreigners to invade or attack America and murder Americans — I will nevertheless continue to defend traditional Judeo-Christian moral values, particularly “Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you,” and “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.” The leftist neocons disagree with me on that, oh well.

And regarding Iran, much of the propaganda comes from Israel, and Benjamin Nutty-Yahoo (Remember the video that surfaced, in which Nutty-Yahoo expressed his true feelings toward the U.S.?). He is not rational, and probably subscribes to the Samson Option, in which, if the Israeli government believes they might be overrun, they will take the entire Middle East (and Europe as well) with them. Much of this has to do with that religiously fanatical [.pdf] belief in “end times.” (And Ron Paul is the “nutjob.”)

Finally, for those who are concerned about an extremist Iranian leader Ahmadinejad or rabid Ayatollah nuking Israel, London or the U.S., or concerned about any crackpot in general having nukes and his “finger on the button,” well, what do you think we have here in the U.S.?

It really isn’t Ron Paul the individual who scares the mainstream pundits and radio blabbermouths, it’s his ideas. We saw from Bob Schieffer’s biased hatchet job on Ron Paul that the Establishment do not like their beloved Big Government made smaller and less threatening to our liberty and security. And yesterday, Chris Wallace commented that a Ron Paul win in Iowa “won’t count,” and that is really not because of Dr. Paul being a “fringe” candidate or because a Ron Paul presidency is a threat to our liberty and security, but because it would be a threat to the Establishment and their power grabs, and all the little bureaucrat dictators in Washington and all their monopolistic fiefdoms.

But for Rush Limbaugh to call Iowa’s Ron Paul voters “nut jobs” (according to Thomas DiLorenzo), is just as deceitful and dishonest as Limbaugh’s lying about Dr. Paul’s comments about 9/11. And yesterday Sean Hannity was bringing back the old “racist newsletter” crap again. That is because they know that Dr. Paul’s message of peace and freedom [.pdf] is being heard by common-sense-thinking Americans who don’t believe that our government’s role should be the world’s policeman (and forcing American taxpayers to pay for it!). As far as what is really crazy, it’s the other way around: Continuing to start wars against other countries who are of no threat to us and lying about them to justify the wars, trespassing on foreign lands that are not U.S. territories and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents, all which only provoke the foreigners to want to act against us. Now, THAT’S crazy!

What else is crazy is this allowing the military to seize innocent Americans at the whim of a soldier, general or military bureaucrat and detain them indefinitely, without any evidence shown against them, without trial. As I explained in my June 2010 article, Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon, these fascist, Soviet-like policies will come back to haunt the Hannities and the Limbaughs, because of their criticisms of the current Communist-In-Chief. This totalitarian, military dictatorship kind of policy is not about al Qaeda or Islamic terrorism, regardless of the liars on Capitol Hill or the White House. It is about control. It is not about communist ‘Occupy’ protesters or protesting Wall Street, because the dictator we have now is himself a communist. He agrees with them, but he does not agree with Hannity and Limbaugh. (I hope they have ADT.)

With the radio blabbermouths and the congressional liars and fascists, when they say phrases such as “if you betray your country, you do not have a right to due process (even though it would take due process to actually determine whether or not you have done what you are accused of doing),” what they mean by “betray your country” is betray the government, the government’s bureaucrats and politicians, and the armed agents who work for them. These people are clearly not devoted to liberty, truth (it takes due process to find out the real truth, not the arbitrary decisions of a soldier or policeman), and certainly not private property rights or the right of the individual to be “secure in one’s person, papers, houses and effects.” No, these people are devoted to the State. That is why Ron Paul scares them, and why they have to lie about his past statements, and smear him when he and his ideas of freedom and peace become popular. These people do not love America – they love the government. They love the State.

Of course, one big reason for this State-love, liberty-hating attitude on the part of these people is the result of having been brought up by government-controlled schools. The schools including colleges are designed to stifle honest intellectual inquiry and suppress the questioning of the word of authority. And the schools and colleges are there to instill a love for authority especially the government. Many people have this childish notion that the State is a god, and that is why those who are devoted to the State themselves have a God-complex. They merge their identities with the State, and they actually don’t mind being subservient to the State and its agents including the police.

Now, Michael Savage has talked about the ‘Occupiers’ as “useful idiots” for the George Soroses and the other Establishment hacks who control various government and corporate entities that have so much control now. “Useful idiots” for the Left and for collectivist causes. I prefer to call people “dupes.” But there are other people who have been dupes for the Left, including the radio blabbermouths and the vast majority of Americans who willingly and subserviently supported George W. Bush’s wars and domestic police state policies. One frightening result of their gullibility will now be the rounding up of and detention of Americans who criticize the Regime. No, it’s not about “terrorists.”Just last night, Michael Savage revealed his fear of the government, because of his strong political views broadcast to many listeners, his many best-selling books, and especially his opposition to and criticism of the Obama Regime. He is not alone in his fear. I, for one, fear our government much more than I fear Islamists.

But how are those such as the self-described “conservatives” dupes for the Left? And how are the Cheney-Bush neoconservatives on the Left and not the Right?

Like the Wilson-Progressive Left’s compulsion to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Cheney-Bush-Feith-Wolfowitz-Perle Neocon Left have an even more developed, grandiose God Complex psychopathy of “reshaping the Middle East” in their image or their distorted view of what America is or is supposed to be: a “democracy.” Now, you want to call Ron Paul a “nut job”? As far as I’m concerned, these people are way out there in terms of any possible grasp on reality. They have none. But in the Cheney Left’s compulsion to “reshape the Middle East” in America’s image (whether the people there want it or not, and while stealing their natural resources as well), the means of implementing their grandiose vision have been of invasions, occupations, trespassing on foreign lands, terrorism against the foreign peoples, trampling on their people’s lives, liberty and property, and total destruction of whole countries. It is for their own good, after all. Regardless of what the radio blabbermouths assert, the neocon Left are not friends to actual Christian moral values.

A better explanation of how the Cheney neoconservatives are on the Left is this: They are ardent followers of central planning. They are the government central planners who know what’s best for everyone else, even though the plans they have been implementing have been a disaster — for Americans and for foreigners.

And the neocon Left’s use of the armed forces of government as a bureaucratic monopoly in territorial protection [.pdf] and funded by Americans through coercion is pure socialism. Socialism can be described as “public ownership of the means of production.” Even that’s not accurate, because the word “public” is merely a euphemism for the “State.” It is really State ownership of the means of production in territorial security. Private Americans are prevented by law from providing security, even the individual states are not allowed to do this. This lack of a market in security, lack of competitive incentives, and, especially with a government monopoly in which the monopolists are never held accountable, is what allows for the atrocities, the outright crimes that our agents of government and military have been committing overseas for decades.

A lot of people are still stuck in their government-controlled school way of thinking that discourages any questioning of the system of monopoly and socialist central planning we have now, no matter how bad it is, no matter how destructive it is, and no matter how tyrannical it is becoming against our liberty and our security. Through their socialist expansion of centralized government especially since 9/11, the neocon Left have paved the way for the next administration — the Obama communist Regime — to use all the expanded executive powers that Bush gave the current communist to use against those who dissent form the government’s doctrine, those who disobey the government’s orders.

The influential radio talk hosts who think they are “conservatives” are not conservative, because they support government central planning socialism, and they oppose free market capitalism and private property rights [.pdf]. If they believed in property rights, they would not have been supporting the U.S. government’s destruction of billions and billions of dollars worth of the property and businesses of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. The “conservative” radio talkers also oppose the right of self-defense. If they believed in the right to self-defense, they would have supported the people of Iraq in their right to defend themselves, their families and their homes and businesses against foreign invaders. After all, if Russia or China invaded the U.S., should we just sit there and take it and not fight back? But what can you expect from self-centered people who merge their self-identities with the State and its armed power. What can you expect from collectivists who believe in “American Exceptionalism,” in which “We can invade and destroy other countries but they can’t invade and destroy us. We own the world.” They oppose the Christian philosophy of “Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you,” and “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.” In a nutshell, the dupes for the Left are as bad as the Left themselves — they do not believe in freedom, pure and simple.

As I wrote in my recent article, war is an artificial concept used by collectivists and statists to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it.

The dupes of the Left who have naively and gullibly supported the post-9/11 government expansionism, further provocations of foreigners and allowing for even more government intrusions into the American people’s lives, businesses, persons and property, have also naively and gullibly laid down their lives to be enslaved and subjected, and imprisoned by the State.

This will be especially the case when the dictator Obama confiscates all privately-owned weapons, the people’s means of self-defense. The people love their abusers, the State and its agents, and that is why so many people smear and lie about Ron Paul, because he is the only one out there willing and courageous enough to tell the truth.

Toward the end of this interview, the RT newsbimbo asked Infowars.com’s Alex Jones why some people dismiss him as a “conspiracy theorist.” Jones replied that he knows what our government has already been doing, from the FEMA camps that are already set up to what we have been seeing before our very eyes: one news item after another how local law enforcement has been militarized, and they already are going after people who are merely trying to take care of themselves and their families, and protect themselves from the probable economic collapse that the government has been causing. The government is using drones against the people especially in rural areas because the government fears those who are self-sufficient and not dependent on the government. There is no “theorizing” here.

Jones notes that the government is going after “land rights activists,” “property rights activists,” “2nd Amendment activists…” In other words, people who believe in truly American principles, the principles that are supposed to separate our country from the totalitarian dictatorships and banana republics of the rest of the world. Alas, with the post-9/11 policies, based solely on the government’s fear-mongering and exploiting its own provoking of foreigners and its terrorizing the American people, our own government is in fact turning America into just another totalitarian dictatorship, in which Premier Obama and Evita will be turning the guns on the American people.

The martial law that our senators who make up the occupying foreign regime in Washington want to impose on the American people on behalf of Obama is not about al Qaeda or “homegrown terrorists,” but about the upcoming economic collapse and civil unrest that the senators know will be happening. And it is also about their fantasizing how they know what’s best for us, and we dare not criticize them and their tyranny. Like the Soviets and the Nazis, the critics of the Regime will be rounded up and imprisoned, because that is how cowardly cockroaches of fascist governments operate.

Now, regarding the local police and their militarization, Michael Graham has pointed out recently how local police departments don’t want people to protect themselves. They want people to call 911 and wait for two hours while the home invaders who have broken into your home murder you. The police are now arresting those who actually defend themselves from home invaders and not the actual criminals who are threatening your life!

These government agents are psychological infants who need you to call them, rather than take responsibility for protecting yourself. That is just one reason why they do not want people to possess any actual means of self-defense. They want people to be vulnerable and unsafe, because that makes these government agents feel more important. They have an infantile, immature unmet need to be needed. If you are independent, and “self-sufficient,” to use Alex Jones’s words, that makes these government agents feel abandoned and rejected. I know, some people don’t like my psychoanalyzing, and my generalizing, but there it is.

Yesterday (or perhaps the day before), Howie Carr and Michael Graham were both talking about Ron Paul, and how “nutty” he is. They are between Newt Gingrich and Willard Romney. Hmmm. Which corrupt sleazebag politician should I vote for, Romney or Gingrich? Both of them are not just “flip-floppers,” but totally unprincipled, shady characters right out of a ’40s gangster movie. The American people need to stop being in such denial of who these people really are, stop supporting the U.S. government’s trespassing on foreign lands, murdering of foreigners and provoking them to act against us, and stop supporting this domestic police state Nazi-Soviet dictatorship.

There’s no “conspiracy theorizing” when it really is happening right before our very eyes.

Within days after my article on due process and presumption of innocence, the U.S. Senate voted to empower the U.S. military to apprehend and detain indefinitely anyone in America, based on the whim of the soldier or military commander, and it will probably eventually include any armed agent of government including local police. As Jacob Hornberger noted, this new provision will codify the U.S. as just another one of many dictatorships throughout world history.

But, even though al Qaeda is virtually non-existent, the Washington imbeciles want to expand and extend the “War on Terror” anyway and include the entire U.S. territory as a “battlefield.” How can we explain this? As Justin Raimondo speculated, the real reason for this new dictatorial power may be because these senators know that America is headed for economic collapse and civil unrest. But as I pointed out in my article on martial law, whether there are terrorists or not, or whether there is a prosperous or collapsing economy, all human beings have inalienable rights, among them the right to presumption of innocence and due process. Any government violations of those rights are crimes against the people, pure and simple.

Sen. Lindsey Graham commented that, “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer,” in his un-American opposition to due process and his approval of apprehending and detaining innocent civilians indefinitely. But, as I asked in my earlier article: Who will determine whether or not one has “betrayed one’s country”? Graham and the other pro-dictatorship government bureaucrats do not seem able to distinguish between someone who actually has acted (or been found guilty of acting) against one’s fellow Americans and someone who is accused of doing so. Graham wants to empower all military personnel (and probably any armed government official) to detain indefinitely those who are merely accused of doing something, without evidence brought forward, without having a lawyer, without access to their families, no due process whatsoever. This is a banana republic dictatorship, and it is thoroughly un-American, thoroughly anti-liberty.

While the senators are hinting at calling those who don’t support the government’s immoral wars as “treasonous,” it really is they, the senators, who are acting treasonously. The senators are now turning the military against the American people. That is treasonous, according to the U.S. Constitution, as turning the military against the people would be the federal government’s “levying war” against the “United States,” that is, the various states of the union, and thus against the people of the states. I have noted before that such treasonous acts have already occurredin America.

Questioning the Legitimacy of the “War on Terror”

Graham and other senators have said that, because “we’re at war,” free speech shouldn’t include the right to criticize such wars or criticize the government’s actions. We shouldn’t be allowed to scrutinize the government’s actions or question the legitimacy of the “War on Terror.”

But what if these wars have been entirely illegitimate? What if actual crimes have been committed by the military soldiers, generals, or bureaucrats? Should we just be obedient little sheep and sweep all that under the rug? What if the aggressions started by the U.S. government, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc., and based on lies and propaganda, have been counter-productive, and resulted in making Americans less safe and less secure? What then? Free speech shouldn’t include the right to expose these things? We should declare as an “enemy combatant” someone who criticizes imbecilic and incompetent bureaucrats, arrest the critic and throw him into prison indefinitely, because the government bureaucrats don’t like their crimes and their idiocy exposed?

In regards to the irrational claim that the entire territory of the United States of America is a “battlefield,” some people are worried about “homegrown” terrorists, those who are here in the U.S. who want to commit “jihad” against innocent Americans. But who motivates them? Our own FBI has been approaching young impressionable Muslim males who had no previous indications of terrorism and usually no prior criminal record, and intentionally motivating them with anti-American rhetoric, getting them emotionally worked up in the name of Islam, providing them with plans, materials, and helping them to set up their “homemade bombs,” etc. to hurt others. In other words, these young Muslims would not have been involving themselves in all this had these FBI provocateurs not approached them in the first place.

Now, as I mentioned previously, in these cases the common sense method to reduce the terrorism threat would be for the FBI to approach these young Muslims and present them with ideas about peace and liberty, American principles, and encourage them to be peaceful and get along with their neighbors. But these are government bureaucrats we are talking about (i.e. lacking common sense). That is why these FBI agents’ actions have been contributors to making Americans’ lives more vulnerable and less safe. They are intentionally attempting to create new terrorists, which is just as dangerous as the drones that the incompetent CIA fires off from their computers, killing many more innocent civilians than terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal noted, for each innocent civilian you kill, you create ten new terrorists.

History

And for those who do not understand the assertion that the U.S. government has been provoking terrorist acts of retaliation, here is a brief summary of what the U.S. government and military did to the people of Iraq throughout the 1990s:

In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, the war that President George H.W. Bush unnecessarily started against Iraq, the U.S. military intentionally destroyed civilian electrical, water and sewage treatment facilities. Air Force Col. John Warden wrote in 1995 that such an action was intentional, as a means to undermine “civilian morale.” Warden wrote that the targeting and destruction of that civilian infrastructure was to “shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants” to result in “epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid.” The U.S. government-led U.N Sanctions on Iraq and Iraqi no-fly zones that followed throughout the 1990s prevented the Iraqis from rebuilding the civilian water and sewage treatment centers, causing them to use untreated water. This led to high rates of child mortality, cancer and other diseases, and the deaths of well over 500,000 innocent civilian Iraqis by the year 2000. It also led to widespread anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East, and was cited by 9/11 terrorists as among their top motivations for their attacks.

Believe it or not, Ron Paul was one of the few people who predicted during the 1990s that the U.S. government’s murderous wars, sanctions and atrocities might lead to terrorists attacks within America’s shores. But because Paul is not an advocate of military socialism and central planning, many people have brushed him off as “eccentric,” or “nutty.”

How dare someone point out that when you commit acts of aggression against others, they may want to retaliate against you! How dare someone point out that when your government commits acts of aggression against foreigners, you are thus making your own fellow Americans less safe!

But senators want to say that critics of the central planners’ incompetence and criminality are “abetting” or “supporting” the terrorists. Those senators want to arrest the government’s critics who don’t bow in obedience, and not the criminals in the government who start wars and commit atrocities against foreigners and make their fellow Americans less safe.

In 1953, the CIA led a coup in Iran that overthrew the duly-elected leader Mossadegh and replaced him with the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. This coup was mainly on behalf of the British and in the name of coveting Iran’s oil for the British. But the U.S. government supported the Shah’s dictatorial regime throughout the 1950, ‘60s and ‘70s, leading up to the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian Revolutionaries taking Americans hostage in 1979.

The Revolutionaries were responding to decades of the Shah’s brutality, supported by the U.S. government. According to this Federation of American Scientists article, the Shah’s ministry of security, SAVAK

expanded its activities to include gathering intelligence and neutralizing the regime’s opponents. An elaborate system was created to monitor all facets of political life. For example, a censorship office was established to monitor journalists, literary figures, and academics throughout the country; it took appropriate measures against those who fell out of line. Universities, labor unions, and peasant organizations, among others, were all subjected to intense surveillance by SAVAK agents and paid informants. The agency was also active abroad, especially in monitoring Iranian students who publicly opposed Pahlavi rule…

Over the years, SAVAK became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely. SAVAK operated its own prisons in Tehran (the Komiteh and Evin facilities) and, many suspected, throughout the country as well…

At the peak its influence under the Shah SAVAK had at least 13 full-time case officers running a network of informers and infiltration covering 30,000 Iranian students on United States college campuses. The head of the SAVAK agents in the United States operated under the cover of an attache at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, with the FBI, CIA, and State Department fully aware of these activities.

Does it seem like our overzealous (and overpaid) U.S. senators are trying to model our government after the Iranian regime? They might as well, in their thoroughly un-American trashing of Americans’ liberty and rights to dissent and due process. The senators seem to want to be like communists in their love for as much expansion of government power and control they can get their hands on.

Now, how can anyone in his right mind not understand the motivations of Iranians to want to harm Americans in 1979, when the Iranians knew full well that the U.S. government was backing their brutal dictatorship? Even someone “with half his brain tied behind his back just to be fair” should understand this.

Conclusion

Our own government has been making us less safe and less secure, by poking hornets’ nests in its provoking foreigners, by engaging in gun-running ops to drug lords as well as attempting to disarm Americans, encouraging young Muslims to become jihadists against Americans, forcing Americans to go through radiation scanners that increase their risk of cancer, a never-ending list of central planning bureaucrats’ constantly posing a danger to us, certainly much more than Islamists. And now these un-American senators want to consider those who question the legitimacy of the illegitimate “War on Terror” as “enemy combatants,” and do God-knows-what to us.

But eventually, I expect more people to realize that this tyranny is inevitable with centralization of power and central planning (a.k.a. “federalism”). You’re going to have to face the fact that central planning doesn’t work, and Leviathan is not “reformable.” The road to this tyranny was paved long ago, especially with Honest Abe, Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The only way to save America is to decentralize it. The states must secede from Leviathan, and the people need to restore their freedom, independence and sovereignty.

If you know any soldiers or other military personnel, National Guardsmen, local police, mayors or governors, please send them my article on martial law, because they need to be reminded that they are legally and constitutionally obligated to disobey any unlawful orders by superiors, including by the President of the United States. Those individuals have sworn to obey and defend the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of Rights!), and their state constitutions as well.

Many of today’s conservatives speak of traditional moral values and free-market capitalism, and say they are “against collectivism, socialism and communism.” But an examination of the actual policies they support and the way they want to implement their “values” shows that many conservatives are really the collectivist, socialist and communist pots calling the kettle black.

An honest look at actual traditional moral values shows that such values naturally coincide with private property rights, self-ownership, freedom of association and freedom of contract. Many of today’s conservatives, however, support government policies in which the individual and one’s property are really owned by the community, and by the State. They also support an always-growing centralized federal government to impose the will of elite special interests onto foreigners.

In my view, socialism is public ownership of the means of production (that includes the people, thus a collective ownership of the individual), and includes central government control and confiscation and distribution of wealth.

And to me, communism is the cumulative result of the always expanding power and control by the central government over the people, industry and wealth, in which the State is the total owner of all property and the people. (See here, here and here.)

The reason I am constantly referring to the United States of America as “USSA” is because America today is a Soviet-like, police-state dictatorship, in which the central government in Washington owns and controls all the property and wealth within the territory.

In America now, the federal government has a de facto ownership of all the people, who are slaves of professional politicians and bureaucrats, their hired guns the police and military, lobbyists and lawyers, and big corporations and banks.

So it is the statist conservatives, from their support for State control in domestic social areas to their support for grandiose overseas democratization projects through wars and violence, in which they are true socialists and communists. Here are a few examples:

Marriage and Children: Political columnist Ann Coulter is quite representative of statist conservatives in general. She remarked, in her criticism of Ron Paul’s views on separating marriage and State, “If state governments stop officially registering marriages, then who gets to adopt? How are child support and child custody issues determined if the government doesn’t recognize marriage?” And conservatives in general are also in favor of using the government to prevent homosexuals from marrying one another.

These views show that Coulter et al. believe that individuals and their relationships and contracts are ultimately owned by the State, and that individuals must therefore get the State’s permission to marry, and to sign on to a mutually beneficial and voluntary contract, even though it is none of the State’s business who the parties are and what the terms of the contract are. This is an example of State ownership of the people, their associations and contracts.

On the child adoption issue, a free-market system would not only be more honest, but better for the children involved. Private, competitive agencies in adoption and foster-care would be based on word-of-mouth, proven competence and so on. Giving the State the authority to approve or disapprove of these situations, means the State owns the people and their children. The State-employed social workers’ loyalty has been to the State, certainly not to children. (See here, here, here, and here, for examples.)

Immigration and Zoning Laws: Statist conservatives get very emotional on the immigration issue. They are not rational. That is because these conservatives are collectivists who view the entire territory as being collectively owned. These conservatives align themselves with the Almighty State that owns all the territory, all businesses and all the people. Because the State owns your business, it has the right to dictate to you whom you may or may not hire at your business, regardless of whether or not you believe that a particular job applicant would be better – better for your business and better for your customers – than the other applicants.

In contrast, with free-market, private property ownership, the businessperson is sole owner of one’s own business, and has a right to hire and fire whomever one wants, for whatever reason. For example, a Mexican sees a job opening posted for a restaurant business located in Arizona. Unless you really want to say that the State owns this individual’s life, then, otherwise he has a right to travel freely to that restaurant (as long as he doesn’t trespass on private property, of course) and interview for the job. And the business owner has a right to hire the Mexican if the owner foresees that his business will prosper with more pleased and better-served customers, which will result in higher wages for the workers there and probably, ultimately, lower prices for the customers. The competition across the street will be outperformed, and perhaps become a laundromat.

Statist conservatives believe in socialist central planning in immigration, even though central planning has screwed up immigration in America for decades. (See here, here, here, and here.)

The statists oppose the right of all individuals to own one’s own life and have the freedom to trade one’s labor or wealth with others in a voluntary contract. When these conservatives say, “You can’t come into our country,” they not only assert a belief in collective ownership of all property within the territory, but they want the State to control labor and production.

Also, many conservatives, independents and progressives become emotional regarding the concept of citizenship. To me, to be a citizen of a country means you belong to that country, which means the country – really, the government, or the community as a collective – owns the individual within the territory. Citizenship cancels out self-ownership as well as any notion of private property ownership. One of your most important aspects of private property is your own life. The individual’s most important private property is one’s own person, labor and what one honestly acquires through voluntary trade. But what the statist conservatives want, and what most people seem to want, unfortunately, is for the collective of the territory to seize ownership and control of the entire territory and all property, capital and resources within it. That includes the people themselves. If the inhabitants of a territory gather together as a collective and assert that an “outsider” must get the collective’s (or government’s) permission to travel within the territory in order to voluntarily trade one’s labor, wealth or property with others already within the territory, then they are asserting a collective ownership of those already within the territory.

The anti-immigration people are true socialists in their opposition to the right of all individuals to property transfer. Someone who lives in, say, Texas, and owns a home, has a God-given right to sell the property to whomever one wants, including to someone who has arrived from Mexico, and the Mexican has the same right to make that purchase and live in the home. Now, if you want to assert that the other neighbors may prevent that from occurring, then you believe in the socialism of the neighbors sharing in ownership of that property. If you believe that the State shares in the ownership of that property, then really the State is the true owner.

Besides immigration, another example of statist conservatives’ belief in collective- and government-ownership of all property is their love for zoning laws. The anti-Muslim conservatives’ opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York was a perfect example of that. Many people wanted to use the armed force of government to prevent the Islamic community center from being built there, even though it is privately owned property.

Private property is not collectively owned by the other people in the neighborhood. You don’t share in ownership of your neighbor’s property. If your neighbor has something within his property that you don’t like, and if it bothers you, then you have the choice of communicating your thoughts and feelings to the neighbor and hoping that he’ll make changes to suit your needs, you can offer to buy the property, or you can move.

Local Police: The statist conservatives’ authoritarian love for police has shown its sickening face in their widespread support of cops committing acts of violence against peaceful protesters. This is an outcome of local governments’ communist ownership of the means of production in community policing and security. The statist conservatives support this communism, in which private production of security in competition to or as an alternative to the government-monopolized police is forbidden. In such a monopoly, in which the government police are armed but the civilians are not, the monopolists are not accountable. These conservatives’ support for this lawless scheme shows that they can’t possibly believe in the rule of law, the right to free speech and the right to protest your government. That is because they believe the government owns the people as its property, and its monopolized police have a right to physically keep the people subjugated (and imprisoned).

In contrast, in a free-market society of voluntary groups and competitive policing and security firms, anyone engaged in policing activities would be held accountable under the rule of law. The “bad apples” would truly be ostracized or put out of business, or jailed. One would think that conservatives would support this moral, free-market alternative. But the truth is, most of today’s conservatives are authoritarians and do not believe in individual liberty, voluntary exchange and the rule of law.

National Security and Wars vs. The Rule of Law and the Truth:

Statist conservatives are devoted to central planning in national security, regardless how flawed, failed, counter-productive and destructive such a grandiose, socialistic scheme has been. Giving a centralized government the monopoly of protecting an entire population from foreign aggressors in a territory spanning thousands of square miles is an impossible task. Not surprisingly, given human nature, and the fact that men are not angels, such empowerment of central planners has only encouraged them to provoke foreigners to act against the people.

The purpose of the government’s monopoly in national security had long ago become to expand the government’s power and its reach territorially, particularly overseas. It is not freedom to be protected, but government to be expanded. That is what the Nazis and the Soviet communists did. They centralized their governments and expanded their reach. The U.S. government has expanded itself into foreign lands for decades, in the name of “American Exceptionalism,” the euphemism for moral relativism.

While the war conservatives have been chanting about “Christian moral values” (“Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you” and “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.”), they have utterly abandoned such values.

While calling it “American Exceptionalism,” the war conservatives and other war supporters have been defending and promoting government’s criminality, pure and simple: coveting other people’s lands and resources, terrorizing and tormenting whole foreign populations, and murdering countless innocents.

Since 9/11 and the Bush era, many conservatives have passively bent over backwards to allow Bush and Cheney, and now Obama, to commit criminal acts of aggression overseas, even more provocations of foreigners than were committed prior to 9/11, and Soviet-like abuses of due process domestically.

But Americans have been numbed by decades of TV-viewing, by government-controlled schools that indoctrinate the people to obediently love the State and never question the word of government.

And now, the Senate has treasonously passed more tyrannical legislation in which agents of the State may – at the agents’ own personal discretion – designate any American a “terrorist,” apprehend someone from one’s home and detain and even torture him, hold him or her indefinitely without charges, without trial or any due process. As I noted here, such crimes against the people immediately violate the individual’s inalienable rights to life and liberty, which include the right to presumption of innocence and due process. Someone who grabs you out of your home and holds you indefinitely without charges is a criminal, regardless of his being employed by the government, military or police. Our own government is now treasonously very Nazi-like in its threats against innocent American civilians.

Because “there’s a war going on,” we will now see how an individual’s speaking out against the Regime, criticizing U.S. government foreign policy, or criticizing or satirizing our bumbling, buffoonish and incompetent government officials will be viewed as a “threat.” Such suppression of dissent is typical of corrupt totalitarian governments.

Already, when people try to discuss the truth about what our government has been doing, they are shouted down, smeared, slandered and referred to as “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” In the minds of the obedient masses, anyone who challenges the word of those in power is to be silenced. Yet, it has been our government officials whose actions against us, and against foreigners, have been thoroughly un-American.

But the “conservatives,” who have been approving of this kind of banana republic society, know what the Wall Street Occupiers want (to use the force of government to covet their neighbors’ wealth and property), the conservatives know what the unions and their gangster henchmen are all about, they know about ACORN, AmeriaCorps, and the “alternative” army that Obama spoke about before being elected President. The “conservatives” and other obedient government supporters have given the Obama-Left carte blanche to arrest and detain those who have criticized the Obama Regime, those who have “anti-government” views, on the radio, in the newspapers, on blogs and comments, Twitter and Facebook, and even those who have Ron Paul bumper stickers.

With Homeland Security’s campaign to “say something if you see (or hear) something,” people are encouraged to snitch on their neighbors. An anonymous tip by a disgruntled neighbor who heard that you oppose the Federal Reserve? You don’t think that’s possible?

You think your views are safe to express “anonymously” on blogs or in comments to a blog? Try preventing your IP address from being known.

“It can’t happen here”?

You see, the “conservatives” and other obedient government supporters have paved the way to the tyrannical, communist Total State, USSA, with their support of Bush’s exploitation of post-9/11 fears and paranoia.

The “conservatives” – along with the Left – in their merging of their identities with the centralized, authoritarian regime in Washington, have gotten to be just like the communists they thought they opposed and hated. And in their supporting the U.S. government’s terrorizing of Americans for ten years now, they have become just like the terrorists with whom they think they are at “war.”

Conclusion

Many of today’s conservatives may talk about “freedom,” “moral values,” “free-market capitalism” and “private property,” but in reality they believe that the people and property are owned by the collective and by the State.

And the statist conservatives do not really believe in moral values. If they did, they would either support Ron Paul, or they would be anarchists and support an all-private property society without monopolist rulers.

But most of all, many of today’s conservatives just love their central planning! (However, if God carved out Washington, D.C. and let it float out to sea, it wouldn’t bother me too much.)